Removing punctuation from txt file in Linux terminal using 'tr' and 'awk' commands

Question

I'm currently taking a crash course in the basics of the Linux terminal and one of the tasks is to replace punctuation in a text file using 'awk' and 'tr' commands. I have tried searching around for solutions but nothing is working for me, any help?

Solution

Using tr (as Glenn Jackman has already pointed out):

cat TEXTFILE | tr -d '[:punct:]' > OUTFILE

Using awk (tested with gawk and mawk):

cat TEXTFILE | awk '{ gsub(/[[:punct:]]/, "", $0) } 1;' > OUTFILE

You can also omit cat with AWK:

awk '{ gsub(/[[:punct:]]/, "", $0) } 1;' TEXTFILE > OUTFILE

Note: TEXTFILE and OUTFILE must be different.

Comments

[kvantour]

Be advised, you never can have OUTFILE to be equal to TEXTFILE. Have a look at Bash Pitfalls 13

[Andriy Makukha]

@kvantour, yeah, I guess even with cat there is no guarantee that cat will finish reading before awk wants to write to it. Thanks.